Who We Are

NARAL Pro-Choice Washington is the leading grassroots pro-choice advocacy organization in Washington state, and we believe that every woman should be able to make personal decisions about the full range of reproductive health options. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington works to protect every woman’s right to access the full range of reproductive health options, including preventing unintended pregnancy, bearing healthy children, and choosing legal abortion. NARAL Pro-Choice Washington is the state affiliate of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

The Official Blog of NARAL Pro-Choice Washington

As you’re probably aware, the Democrats are currently weighing whether abortion rights are important enough to fight for. Specifically, the man who heads up the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which provides funding and support to congressional candidates, said recently that the Party will throw its support behind candidates who oppose women’s right to choose when, whether, and how to start a family. Nothing could be more fundamental, yet the leaders of the only major party that has vowed in the past to protect that right consider it nonessential. At a time when both parties of Congress, the White House, and the judiciary are controlled by the party that is explicitly anti-choice, the failure of the Democratic Party to say they will fight for women on this most basic level is inexcusable. Moreover, it tells women—the absolute bedrock of the Democratic Party—that their rights and humanity don’t matter. If the Democrats abandon women, then women may well abandon the Democrats.

Another prominent male Democrat who has picked up his party’s “abortion rights don’t matter” banner is California Governor Jerry Brown, who said this week that making the right to choose a nonnegotiable value would make the Democrats no different than “the Marxist Party in 1910. Hasn’t this guy been governor long enough?

Fortunately, there are a lot of people who’ve been willing to stand up to this appalling abdication of responsibility by the nominally “pro-choice” party, starting with NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue. Hogue told the AP this week that “Every time the Democrats lose an election, they start casting about in ways that are deeply damaging to the base. If they go out and start recruiting anti-choice candidates under the Democratic brand, the message is, ‘We’re willing to sell out women to win,’ and politically that’s just suicide.” Elaborating on NPR, Hogue said, “If there was ever a stronger signal sent that women are looking for leadership who has our backs because equality and justice is more important in the Trump administration than it’s ever been, that moment is now.”

Many progressive groups, thankfully, are fighting back, by signing a joint statement pledging not to support candidates who don’t support a woman’s right to choose. Alternet has the full statement, and Glamour reports:

The right to decide how and when to have a family has a huge impact on other vital party issues, like the economy, education, and gender equality. But more important, the statement says, women cannot be free in a society that forces them to have children against their will. “As progressives, we stand united in the belief that a woman’s autonomy over her own body is not a secondary issue or a ‘social issue,’ but rather a human right and a necessity in order to attain and preserve economic security in her life,” it reads.

The consequences of deeming abortion rights inessential are far from theoretical. In Texas, Republican legislators—emboldened by Trump’s election and undeterred, as Rewire reports, by last year’s Supreme Court ruling striking down laws designed to force abortion providers out of business—are moving ahead with several new proposals to limit or eliminate women’s right to choose. The first and furthest-reaching would bar private insurance companies from providing abortion coverage except as a separate, “abortion-only” policy, forcing women to anticipate in advance whether they will have an unintended pregnancy (kind of an oxymoron) or become pregnant as the result of rape—one reason pro-choice activists are calling the proposal the “rape insurance” bill. (Insurance, as a reminder, is supposed to insure against unanticipated medical events, making the supplemental abortion-only “insurance” policy anything but.)

Three other bills, the Houston Chronicle reports, would require doctors to report more detailed personal information about abortion patients to state authorities, including specific details about women under 18 who seek judicial bypasses to the state’s parental-consent law, and would prohibit the state from contracting with Planned Parenthood clinics for non-abortion-related services.

What will happen if Democrats capitulate to Republicans by declaring that women’s rights don’t matter? Most likely, we’ll see a proliferation of Texas-style laws across the country, including states run by anti-choice Democrats. When the Democrats’ “big tent” expands so much that encompasses anti-choice Republican values, is there any good reason for women to stay inside?

Share this:

Like this:

Women in Seattle and the rest of King County, Washington, had reason to celebrate this week, when the King County Board of Health voted to adopt a new rule requiring “crisis pregnancy centers”—fake “clinics” run by anti-choice nonprofits that bait pregnant women with promises of medical care and counseling, then try to talk them out of having abortions—to disclose the fact that they do not actually provide any health-care services. Starting in one month, CPCs will have to display a large sign declaring “This is not a health-care facility” in 10 different languages, and include the same information on all their promotional materials.

CPCs generally provide pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, and may offer samples of formula and diapers. Their main purpose, however, is to frighten women out of terminating even risky pregnancies by providing misinformation about abortion and birth control, including claims that abortion leads to cancer, suicide, and “post-abortion syndrome.”

Rewire, The Stranger, Q13, and MyNorthwest covered the Thursday vote. (KIRO, typically the most conservative of Seattle’s local news outlets, did a one-sided story that repeated false talking points from opponents and did not include any interviews or perspective from the proponents of the new rule, which passed on Thursday with just one dissenting vote).

Senate Republicans’ noxious health care bill is dead, so you may be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief. Not so fast, though—not only do Republicans who supported the bill, and President Donald Trump, hope to revive it as “repeal and delay”—that is, eliminate Obamacare and replace it with nothing, ending health care coverage for 32 million Americans—the GOP has found other ways of cutting women’s health care without repealing the Affordable Care Act altogether. Rewire reports that the US House Appropriations Committee approved budgets for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and education that include deep cuts to family planning programs. Notably, the bill eliminates $286 million in funding for family planning through the Title X program, which provides health care to low-income people.

Additionally, the committee cut $6.4 million in funding for the Office of Women’s Health and $11.4 million for the Office of Minority Health.

Six months after Trump sat in the Oval Office surrounded by white men and signed off on the reinstatement and expansion of the global gag rule–a law that bans US funding for organizations that provide or even discuss abortion anywhere in in the world—the Guardian takes a look at how the rule is playing out worldwide.

As much as $10bn (£7.7bn) of global health funding hangs in the balance. Among those who will lose money if they refuse to sign up to the anti-abortion orthodoxy are the two big international family planning organisations, Marie Stopes International (MSI) and the IPPF. But for the first time, global NGOs such as Save the Children, WaterAid and the International HIV/Aids Alliance are also targeted.

The effects will be felt most keenly in the tiny, frontline clinics run by small NGOs struggling to help women and children in crowded townships, refugee camps and remote rural villages. There are no abortion doctors in such places (in most African countries, abortion is banned unless the woman’s life is in danger). These clinics instead offer contraceptive injections and condoms for those who would struggle to feed numerous children. But they also treat children for malaria and malnutrition and their mothers for HIV. This integrated care is now under threat.

The Trump administration’s antipathy toward women’s rights is so great that organizations like Save the Children (and, the piece goes on to note, the UN Population Fund) will suffer if they refuse to comply with administration policies. And if they do comply, they can no longer provide potentially life-saving services and information to women. No matter what organizations do, as long as the global gag rule is in place, women and their families around the world will suffer.

But what’s behind Trump’s assault on women’s physical autonomy? Michele Goldberg, writing at the New York Times, has a theory: He wants to “accomplish legislatively” what he has bragged about doing to women physically—manhandling their bodies. In a piece aptly titled “The Playboy President,” Goldberg notes the “deeply insulting irony” that an “erotically incontinent libertine”—a President whose resume includes a cameo in a softcore porn video, and who gleefully bragged about being able to grab women “by the pussy”—is spearheading what could be the most significant rollback of women’s rights since the days before Roe v. Wade. “Mr. Trump doesn’t care about women’s health or rights, and it’s easy to outsource policy to the activists of the religious right who helped elect him,” Goldberg concludes. “When you’re the president, they let you do it.”

Oh—and lest you think the judicial branch will be an effective check on the Trump Administration’s worst excesses, consider this: John Bush, the latest youthful judge to receive a Trump nomination to a lifetime seat on the federal bench, is an unqualified anti-choice blogger who has compared abortion to slavery. His nomination to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals sailed through the Senate on Thursday.

Share this:

Like this:

As readers of the Femorandum are undoubtedly aware, the US Senate is currently working frantically to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and eliminate insurance coverage for 22 million Americans. (If you haven’t called your senators yet, there’s still time! Find out their contact information here). Repealing the ACA would particularly impact vulnerable women who need family planning services or rely on Planned Parenthood for health care, along with their families.

But regardless of what happens with the health care bill, Republicans in the House are moving forward with a proposal to zero out Title X funding for family planning services, eliminating $300 million in funding for family planning for low-income women, including $60 million in funding for Planned Parenthood. The cuts, according to Rewire, will disproportionately impact “a diverse population of people with low incomes.”

Of 4 million patients who benefit from Title X funding, “30 percent self-identified as Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, or American Indian or Alaska Native; 32 percent self-identified as Hispanic or Latino; and 13 percent had limited English proficiency.”

Republicans who advocate cutting Planned Parenthood’s funding have argued, consistently and inaccurately, that women who need family planning services can simply go to community clinics. Pro-choice advocates have pointed out that community clinics that provide family planning services are already badly overburdened, and that many of the “clinics” Planned Parenthood opponents suggest women use aren’t clinics at all.

It’s easy to laugh at the suggestion that women seeking birth control go to a dentist or a school nurse. But a real-world experiment on the results of cutting funds for Planned Parenthood has been going on in Texas, and the results have been devastating. The Huffington Post reports that according to a study by researchers at Texas A&M University, in the first three years after Texas lawmakers slashed the state’s family planning budget—forcing the closure of more than 80 women’s health clinics—the abortion rate among teenagers has actually increased. The cuts, in other words, are accomplishing exactly the opposite of their stated goal—and doing so at a time when the teen pregnancy and abortion rate nationwide is actually going down.

According to HuffPo, “The greatest rises in abortion rates occurred in rural areas, where access to affordable family planning care was already scarce. In Gregg County, where the local health center lost 60 percent of its family planning funding, the abortion rate increased by 191 percent between 2012 and 2014.” What prevents abortion? Medically accurate sex education (also in short supply in Texas) combined with access to birth control and other family planning services. People who need abortions will find ways to access them, even in states like Texas that try to make it as difficult and financially draining as possible.

Another state that’s engaged in an incredibly misguided attempt to stop women from accessing a legal medical procedure is Arkansas, where lawmakers just passed a bill that will require women seeking abortions to inform and potentially get permission from the men who impregnated them, even in pregnancies that result from rape or incest. The bill accomplishes this by including fetuses in a rule that requires family members to agree on how to dispose of human remains—a change that also, conveniently, opens the door to “personhood” for embryonic tissue. The legislation also requires women under 18 to get permission from their parents for abortions. NARAL Pro-Choice America and the American Civil Liberties Union are among many groups opposing this outrageous violation of women’s rights, the Independent reports.

Women who choose abortion in Arkansas must also undergo mandatory “counseling” and wait 48 hours before getting the procedure, requirements designed to scare women out of having abortions and make the procedure, which often requires women to travel and take days off work, prohibitively expensive.

One state that’s working to fight back against restrictions on abortion access is Oregon, where lawmakers passed a bill this week that will require insurance companies to cover abortion at no cost to patients. The Huffington Post reports that the bill, which aims to both preempt ACA repeal and expand access to coverage beyond what all other states, including Washington, require, would also extend abortion coverage to undocumented immigrants and keep abortion legal in Oregon, even if Roe v. Wade is overturned. Thanks to Initiative 120, which Washington State voters passed in 1991, abortion rights are protected at the state level; however, Washington legislators have consistently failed to pass a reproductive parity bill that would ensure women women have access to abortion coverage through their insurance companies.

Share this:

Like this:

The big news this week was the US Senate’s latest tax cuts for the wealthy health care “reform” bill, which in addition to eliminating coverage for millions of poor Americans who get their health care through Medicaid and setting up a death spiral for the individual market will once again make being a woman a preexisting condition, effectively end private coverage for abortion care, and defund Planned Parenthood. Here are some details from the “Better Care Reconciliation Act”—drafted in secret by 13 Republican men—that are especially concerning for women and for anyone who benefits from access to reproductive health care (that is, everyone).

Vox focuses on the BCRA’s elimination of the “essential health benefits” mandate, which required insurance companies to cover ten basic health care services, including mental health and maternity care. (Under the bill, governors in conservative states will be able to opt out of the essential health benefits requirement by virtual fiat, with no consultation with their legislatures). “f the Better Care Act passes, it could mean we could turn back to a time before the Affordable Care Act, when some 88 percent of plans on the individual market did not provide maternity coverage,” Vox reports.

The bill would also defund Planned Parenthood for one year by barring Medicaid recipients from using Planned Parenthood clinics. Given that half of Planned Parenthood’s patients use Medicaid, the one-year cut would represent a devastating blow both to the clinic network and to women on Medicaid who use the clinics for basic health care, including birth control and cancer screenings.

The New York Times reports that despite a tidal wave of individual contributions in the wake of the Trump election, Planned Parenthood’s funding falls far short of what it would need to serve the millions of Medicaid clients who come through its doors every year. “those new funds do not come close to compensating for the money that the bill would strip away. The national office and affiliates of Planned Parenthood together rely on reimbursements and grants from the government for more than 41 percent of their total $1.35 billion in revenue, according to the group’s latest annual report.

Dame Magazine points out another way in which the Republican health-care repeal bill is particularly cruel to women. By allowing states to seek waivers from the requirement that insurers can’t deny access to health care because of preexisting conditions, the bill could make it impossible for women who report their rapes to get health care coverage. Or, conversely, it could create a perverse incentive for women not to report their rapes, for fear of losing coverage in the future:

When women report an assault, people often ask, “Why didn’t she report it?” and inquire what the victim was wearing or why she was in that place at that time. Those questions are just one aspect of blaming victims of sexual assault that frequently discourages people from reporting attacks.

The consequences of sexual assault qualifying as a preexisting condition will be widespread:

According to Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, an American is raped every 98 seconds. One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. And those are the assaults on the record; many go unreported.

“People ask, ‘Why didn’t she report it sooner? Why was she doing this? Why did this happen?’” Jessica [who reported her rape] said. “So she gets punished for doing that. And then I’d be punished for doing what they ask people to do. The fact that I saw a therapist to try and get better shouldn’t penalize me if I have to go see a therapist again.”

Vox explains how allowing insurance companies to discriminate against people with preexisting conditions will mean financial ruin for many Americans, by creating a “death spiral in the health care system. Basically, by allowing states to opt out of requiring coverage for preexisting conditions, and by allowing insurers to offer bare-bones coverage that doesn’t include essential health benefits, the Senate bill sets up a two-tiered system in which healthy people with no preexisting conditions buy the cheaper, minimal insurance and everybody else is stuck buying the more expensive, more comprehensive kind. As more and more healthy people leave the comprehensive insurance market, that market will fill up with older, sicker people, driving up costs so far that none but the wealthiest can afford decent insurance.

Consider, for example, a family with a spouse or parent with cancer whose drug treatment costs thousands of dollars for their drugs. They think they have a victory in that under the Senate plan, their insurance company can’t explicitly charge them more because of their family member with a pre-existing condition. But, unfortunately for them, they find that they live in a state that allows insurers to offer plans that don’t cover prescription-drug costs. This family will face nothing but bad choices.

Because the skinny, incomplete plans are a non-starter for them, they can’t take the cheap option. But everyone who’s young or healthy does. The only people choosing the alternative, signing up for a plan that actually meets their needs, are those with serious conditions. This will further drive up the costs of these plans—the only plans that actually cover the treatment that seriously sick people need—and will further drive the young and the healthy away.

“The abortion restrictions in the House-passed AHCA mirror the ACA’s failed Stupak-Pitts Amendment, according to Guttmacher Institute Senior Policy Manager Adam Sonfield, who spoke with Rewire in the lead-up to Thursday’s reveal in the Senate. Senate Republicans also appear to rely on the Stupak-Pitts model,” Rewire reports.

“For the uninitiated, then-Reps. Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Joe Pitts (R-PA) in 2009 played into the GOP myth that taxpayer money is fungible. Their amendment sought to bar the ACA’s tax credits from subsidizing any health insurance plan that covers abortion, not just abortion care itself in compliance with longstanding federal policy. The amendment passed the House with the help of 64 Democrats,” but failed in the Senate, which passed the slightly less-restrictive [Ben] Nelson Amendment instead.

Bottom line: Republicans are going beyond banning direct federal funding for abortion, and are trying to stop all health insurers from covering abortions—a lack of coverage that will disproportionately impact low-income women.

The expanded abortion funding ban originated with the far-right Republican Study Committee in the House, which wrote that they would not support any health care bill that did not include cuts to Planned Parenthood and restrictions on federal support for plans that cover abortion. “The bill, they wrote, fulfills ‘an important conservative commitment to promote life and protect the unborn,'” the New York Times reports.

Share this:

Like this:

There’s a certain danger in paying too much attention to the daily barrage of terrifying headlines that now dominate the daily news cycle. Today, alone, we learned that President Trump has acknowledged he is under investigation for obstruction of justice; that administration officials are genuinely afraid he will fire both the special prosecutor appointed to investigate him and the man who appointed him, deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein; and that Trump has appointed a wedding planner with a possibly falsified resume to head up New York’s federal housing programs.

The problem is that while we’re paying attention to the latest crisis, Trump and his allies in Congress are hoping we don’t notice that they’re rolling back health care for millions of Americans with “preexisting conditions” like pregnancy and depression; appointing right-wing bloggers who compared abortion to slavery to federal judgeships; and opportunistically exploiting a tragic shooting by suggesting that Democrats are to blame for gun violence (while ignoring the common denominator that unites virtually all mass shooters).

So before you return to your regularly scheduled programming of late-night Presidential tweetstorms and speculation about modern-day Saturday Night Massacres, here’s a closer look at some of the stories that didn’t make it above the fold.

Senators have worked hard to keep the latest version of legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act under wraps, but Axios reported that it will likely allow states to request waivers so that insurance companies won’t have to cover “essential health benefits”—things like maternity care, which the so-called “pro-life” party does not consider an important part of health care coverage. (Hey, none of the elderly white men who run the party will ever get pregnant, so why should they)? States could also get out of a requirement that limits how much more older people can be charged than younger people—a provision that disproportionately impacts women, since women generally live longer than men.

Many people who get their insurance coverage through an employer would not be protected, because the Senate health-care bill would once again allow annual and lifetime limits on coverage for non-“essential” benefits in states that apply for waivers to the essential benefits requirement; this would apply to both the individual and employer markets. The Center for American Progress estimates that some 27 million people who get insurance from their employers would face annual caps on their coverage, and about 20 million would face lifetime caps—meaning that a single complicated pregnancy, or bout with ovarian cancer, could max out a woman’s insurance coverage for a year—or the rest of her life.

You might think HUD director Ben Carson was the only underqualified Trump appointee who once compared abortion to slavery, but think again—John K. Bush, a right-wing blogger whom Trump nominated to the powerful 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, has written that “slavery and abortion” are “the two greatest tragedies in our country.” Think Progress reports that Bush went on to claim that Martin Luther King, Jr. “would have opposed Roe v. Wade had King been alive when that case was handed down. In reality, there’s no evidence that King — who supported efforts to increase access to birth control and said in 1960 that he’s always been deeply interested in and sympathetic with the total work of the Planned Parenthood Federation’— would have stood against reproductive rights.

Bush has also argued that there is no way a black man or a woman could become President without some unfair advantage; expressed outrage that passport applications were changed to acknowledge the existence of same-sex parents; and referred to the Rodney King beating as “a police encounter.” Politico calls Bush “shocking in his blatant disdain for equal rights and animus toward racial and other minorities.” The Senate is still considering his appointment, and the Leadership Conference is encouraging people to contact their senators to urge them not to approve the appointment.

While Republicans, and many in the media, were quick to seize on the fact that Congressional baseball practice shooter James T. Hodgkinson had been a Bernie Sanders supporter, ThinkProgress (and others) point out a far more relevant common denominator between Hodgkinson and the vast majority of mass shooters: A history of domestic violence and misogyny. Think Progress reports that Hodgkinson was arrested in 2006 for assaulting a woman who tried to intervene when she witnessed him “throwing his daughter around”a bedroom. Hodgkinson, the woman said, punched her in the face.

Men who hurt female family members often go on to hurt other people, yet most mainstream news organizations fail to connect the dots. Robert Dear, the man who shot and killed three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, had a history of domestic violence; so did Omar Mateen, the shooter who killed 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando one year ago. The list goes on and on and on. Violence against women is one of the best predictors for future mass violence. Yet we don’t treat it as such. And that’s a tragedy.